


it's a peel out the watchword, just peel out the watchword

by voltaires



Category: Community (TV)
Genre: F/F, F/M, Mental Health Issues, compulsory heterosexuality, recovery and growth, rule 63 abed, the trials and tribulations of misogyny, undiagnosed asperger's syndrome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-14
Updated: 2018-07-14
Packaged: 2019-06-10 08:58:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,844
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15288087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/voltaires/pseuds/voltaires
Summary: "Inability to understand people" is mistaken for "stupid." "Butter noodles" are mistaken for "ramen."





	it's a peel out the watchword, just peel out the watchword

She knows it when Jeff makes her a fake hospital bracelet: a strip of copy-paper taped around her wrist with his tight handwriting circling it. Diagnosed: Weird. Class A. Britta slaps him on the forearm and says _Jeff!_ and Ayat twists her mouth to the right. The revelation is this: number one. she knows she is weird. number two. she has known it for longer than this bracelet has said. number three. she will never stop being the way that she is; she doesn’t know how. number four. mom took her to the zoo once; once, because the smell of the elephants was too loud and hung over her head and mom got embarrassed when she sat on the ground with her head between her knees, a high buzz ringing circles around her head.

HOMO SAPIENS. DO NOT AGITATE.

 _Inability to understand people_ is mistaken for _stupid_. _Butter noodles_ are mistaken for _ramen._ She accepts the frugal box of Maruchan from Britta and leaves it under her bed. There was a roommate who flat-ironed her hair and kissed Troy; forgotten strands escaping from her solid elastic and curling around her ears, and Troy with his hands on the mattress of the bottom bunk, then in his lap, then curling around her ears like he didn’t know what to do with himself. It was a bad kiss. Ayat said so, from the doorway. _This is a bad kiss_. Troy screamed and the roommate said that this was _the_ final straw, very importantly; ayat nadir you are annoying and unreadable and every time i get a call you turn the volume up (“I can’t focus with subtitles on,” says Ayat. “I’ll keep _looking_ at them.”) and i am taking this up with administration! good- _bye_! She does not mean the _good_.

Britta _scrimped_ for a box of ramen and that seems foreboding, significant. The girl loses a room and Ayat gains a top bunk. Zero-sum game. Troy says, “You’re good at economics.”

 

 

She hates him for losing Fievel; hates him even harder for not _caring_ that he lost Fievel. He thinks it’s a stupid name. An American Tail.  _Tail_ , like a rat’s tail, but also like a story! It’s funny!

(It’s _lame_ , and so are _mice_.)

Fievel is a rat. An albino rat.

She wants to start a fight about it, when they are all in the study room, but she’s not exactly sure of how to go about doing that. The most apt avenue is the one where she tells Jeff that Troy lost their Biology grade and Jeff gives a speech about friendship and commitment and Troy says _I’m sorry, Ayat_ , and they find Fievel.

She loves this scenario; plays it in her head and rewinds, again, again, again. She likes to pause on the still image of Jeff beaming, wide and proud, at the end of his speech.

Things don’t go according to plan: Jeff is cranky and visibly hungover and wearing sunglasses indoors to boot, and she says, “Jeff, Troy won’t–” and Jeff says, “ _You_ solve it,” to nobody. Troy says, “Snitch,” full to the brim with resolve, and folds his arms on the table. Shirley says, “Troy, honey, that’s not nice.” Pierce says, “Listen to your mother,” with a hand on Troy’s shoulder.

 

 

Her brain is not scrambled eggs, nor is it fried chicken, or lopsided pancakes. It is jelly: decidedly less substantial than jam, more prone to leakage and that unpleasant, gummy feeling rolling between the tongue and the roof of the mouth. Strawberry, if the red stains discoloring the surface of her vision are any indicator. It’s on her hands, too: dark and slippery in the spaces between her fingers, running rivers in the ridges of her palm.

Maybe raspberry, then.

Most of the time, you don’t _need_ soap to clean anything. She isn’t sure of why the world hasn’t realized this yet, or maybe this revelation is too simplistic, and _she_ is the one who hasn’t realized something crucial. But there is, of course, a difference between _clean_ and _sanitized_ , and things don’t necessarily _have_ to be sanitized: people are obsessed with scrubbing the flaws from the surface and submerging whatever they do not want to have to deal with in a soapy bath and forgetting about it. She’s had enough blood in her mouth to know that, from biting her tongue, and lips, blooming red and staining her gums and earning disappointed _tuh!_ s from the dentist. More visceral than jelly, but with lack of that unpleasant, gummy feeling rolling between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. _There’s_ an advantage. She may be an optimist.

The patience that surrounds her is intended to be reassuring; she is sure of this, guaranteed in the slow, gentle way Britta talks, leans forward. Crowds and cradles her. It is stifling. The tension could crack her in half: she cannot forget to eat or sleep because there are people who need her to remember. She is always pretending to exist. That has been her truth for a long time, but now she is standing still long enough to notice it.

She is content to sink into her couch watching television static if it means that the door stays closed.

This is her method now; she never _really_ stopped being her father’s daughter. The right hit to the nose would slice the jelly in half, and that would be the end of her. Which.

She wouldn’t mind, but other people* would, so she pretends that she would, too.

*Annie.

 _She knows the sky is not flat; she_ knows _this. There is empirical evidence to suggest otherwise. number one. She has been in a cloud. Her head lives in them and seems perfectly content to be there, as it has kindly let the rest of her body know. number two. She can sit on a fire escape still enough to see the way the clouds move in the sky. Surges of wind in labor. number three. She thinks of_ The Truman Show _, and the sky looks flat and painted and it_ must _be a dome. The same shade of blue, the same shade of white, a snowglobe in ignorant splotches of grey. Except. The rest of her lives in a rectangle and it has never snowed upside-down even though the ground under her feet has been turned beneath her quite often. The only constants: the fire escape; zuhurat tea; midwife wind, gentle labor, the way the brown houses turn purple in the sunset and sit stiff and away from each other, embarrassed. The shadows are too deliberate to have been accidental; that is why she believes in God. Angry streaks of light melt the horizon, whip her cheeks._

_She sits away from her body and practices smiling._

And, okay, other people. She can concede to that. Jeff tries to make her pretty for a Friday night and she feels the way a pin-up girl looks: ugly and trussed up, contorted, the malleable skin of her belly twisted. Spun and braided; a wet razor, shaved bits of herself pooling on the floor of the shower. There goes the _Spider-Man_ trilogy. _M.A.S.H._ follows. Jeff cares, and this is how he says it, but that does not stop her cowering like a prized show-pig.

“Oh, Ayat,” says Shirley, falsetto and sticky smile. “You look… nice.”

“Jeff helped me.”

“The three of us,” says Jeff, gesturing between himself, Britta, and Ayat, “are going out for drinks.” It is the only way Britta will agree to go anywhere with him. The prospect of being a third-wheel is too sitcom-in-a-can for Ayat to pass up.

She doesn’t drink, anyway. Safety first. That, and she is twenty, and she believes in God.

“Thank you,” she says, when they are shuffling out of the study room but it is early enough for Jeff not to be annoyed that she is taking forever to collect her bag. That is what she’s supposed to say; it’s automatic, preprogrammed. “For helping me.” That is her own. Her throat spasms.

Troy’s hand hovers above his bag, and what he says is, “Well, Fievel was _our_ project,” but to Ayat’s dizzy mind it sounds like _of course._

Jeff presses his keys to her palm.

“Don’t let me have my keys back,” he says, stern. “And roll up the partition if Britta and I get hot and heavy.”

“I think I’m too drunk to drive,” says Ayat. There is no partition in a Lexus.

 

 

Britta likes video games, but she likes talking more.

“I think you might be the _only_ woman at Greendale that Jeff isn’t trying to sleep with,” says Britta. “Well, you and Shirley.”  
  
An enemy combatant ducks out from behind the trees and lunges through the air; Ayat surges forward to meet him, her left thumb stressing the joystick, and hacks away with her sword, _X X X X X_ , before he can swing his battle-axe at Britta.  
  
“Actually,” says Britta. The controller sits limp in her palm. “Jeff might be a closet racist.”

 

 

She spends an absurd amount of time writing a hackneyed script for a short film. “About a man in a coma who realizes he is in a coma and has to wake up before his family pulls the plug,” she explains.

“Does he wake up?” says Annie.

“Yes,” says Ayat. Troy breathes a sigh of relief. “But it turns out he was a woman the whole time.”

“That sounds…” says Shirley, searching for an adjective to convey the exact measure of the smile plastered on her face. Too wide, all teeth.

“Terrible,” says Jeff, like the underside of a knife. Blunt and cutting; a paradox. “It should end with him accepting his mortality, as we all should.” He spreads his arms in a benevolent gesture; his stubble is patchy and he looks distinctly grimy.

“Well, hello, Miss Sunshine,” says Britta.

Ayat casts Troy and Annie, trashing her initial idea for the final twist and instead decreeing that the man will have developed a fantasy life within his coma. She borrows Jordan and Elijah Bennett under the guise of babysitting and casts them as Troy and Annie’s children.

“I don’t get it,” says Troy. “This dude’s got a sweet life. Hot wife, cute kids, _and_ he’s the President?”

“He’s not the President,” says Ayat.

“No, I just put that in. Why does he want to wake up if he’s got all _this_?”

“Maybe he feels bad for his coma-wife’s lack of free agency,” says Britta. She is draped over the top bunk and chewing on a hangnail despite Ayat’s insistence that this is a _private_ session for cast and crew _only_.

“Maybe he loves her and wants to try and find her in the real world,” supplies Annie; she has gone red to her ears. _Hot wife._ “Oh!” Annie flutters her hands, perched on the edge of the sofa. Ayat had traded Leonard two boxes of grocery-store sushi for his dusty plaid couch; she thinks Leonard may have won: she hates sushi, but the couch smells like canned soup. “Maybe _she’s_ in a coma too, and they’re connected on some, like, spiritual wavelength!”

Ayat says, “Let me revisit the script. Take five.”

“Where’s Elijah?” says Britta; Ayat’s problems exponentiate.

 

 

She does not know when it happens; it starts with Troy in the study room; then he is in her dorm after class, playing video games or watching VHS tapes of movies that she finds at Goodwill because dad won’t let her steal the DVD player yet; then, inexplicably, they are always together. “Attached at the hip,” is what Shirley says; she is in a constant battle between endearment and scandal. “Attached at the taint,” Pierce.

He stops being Troy and she stops being Ayat. They are Troy & Ayat. Not for individual sale.

Annie hovers beyond the invisible line drawn around them. There is a moment, after Spanish, when Ayat lingers behind to watch Troy and Annie crowd the doorway; Troy’s hand slips into hers. Annie’s shoulders stiffen; she looks at Troy, mouth forming a silent _Oh!_ , and Troy’s hand jumps away. Ayat wonders, briefly, if Annie has one of those practical joke buzzers nestled in her palm, but then Troy says, “Oh, sorry, I thought you were Ayat.”

Annie asks if they are dating, when she is trying to goad Ayat into having her toenails painted. She does not see the appeal; she rarely ever looks at her toes, and nail polish does not stop them from being long and brown.

She bites the inside of her cheek and draws blood. “No.” She nurses the pain; chases it to the bumpy ridges of healed wounds.

Everybody thinks Troy is in love with her. They make jokes about it. _Troy and Ayat are sleeping together_ jokes, or _Troy would do anything for Ayat_ jokes, and they’re not really jokes because she understands them.

She is not sleeping with Troy (she is sleeping _around_ him, in her bed; he sleeps on the couch, when he stays, and she says _take the bottom bunk_ and he says _it’s not right_ , Christian guilt and childhood sleepovers on the tip of his tongue) and he would not do _anything_ for her (but he would come close to it), and it is not that she has much integrity built around her virginity, or that she is oblivious, or cruel, or that she doesn’t know that he follows her with wide-eyed devotion through pop-culture fields and various escalations of unashamed fun (it is a two-way road; he leads her everywhere else).

She does not know what it _is_ yet, but it is not dating.

 

 

Jeff picks a fight to defend Ayat’s honor; Shirley desperately tries to convert her study group; Jeff attempts to sedate a fight to protect his friendship with Shirley; Shirley learns tolerance for interfaith celebrations.

Mike visits the Student Health Center to have a candy-cane extracted from his esophagus. Ayat thinks she has _honor_ , until she tastes it and spits it back out.

 

 

“Do you want to go to this Valentine’s Day dance with me?”

She looks at Jeff. “Is this a bad-boy-falls-for-girl-next-door rom-com thing?”

Jeff says, “First of all, Annie would be the girl-next-door in my rom-com.” He cringes. “No, pretend I didn’t say that.”

Ayat nods and returns to her phone. There is a text from Britta that reads _:^)_ ; then, _Turn it sideways!!_

“No, I meant because if I ask any other woman she’ll think I’m trying to pick her up.” He rolls his eyes. To Jeff, his own magnetism is a blessing and a curse in one neat, blond package. His phone vibrates. He turns it sideways.

Ayat says _all right_ ; up until that point, her Valentine’s plans had been to embark on an eighties marathon with Thai takeout. This seems less lonely; more _participatory_. Annie is asked by Vaughn: she reassures the group that he _will_ wear a shirt.

Troy dances with a girl that Ayat does not know (as an identifier, this is as broad as it gets). The event is classy for Greendale, with minimal strobe-lighting. Annie’s influence, taming Dean Pelton’s eccentricities. For this, she is grateful. _Thank Annie_ gets filed away. Jeff tries to dance with Ayat, but she is too stiff and he keeps craning his neck to search for Britta, so they stumble for a minute in less of a dance, more of a fight of whose will is stronger. He must see her; his hands disappear from Ayat’s shoulders and she is swaying alone between people. She circles Troy and his date, trying to say, “I’m going to my room to watch _When Harry Met Sally_ , do you want to come?” but only making it through the first half of the sentence before Troy’s date says, “Sounds nice! Have fun.”

Troy smiles and they turn and turn and are swallowed into the throng of couples. Indistinguishable. She spoons punch into a paper cup and looks for somebody that she knows, or else a viable exit.

They return, swinging near her, pressing the border of the undulating mass of bodies. “What was wrong with Ayat?” says Troy. She flattens herself against the wall and sips the punch. Watered down cough medicine. It wraps around the base of her throat and squeezes.

“Well,” says the girl. Her hair is red. She is excessively pretty; she reminds Ayat of the girls who put salad dressing in her locker in high school. “I always see her around you.”

“She’s my best friend,” says Troy.  
  
The girl says, “She’s just _weird_.” She shrugs. She holds her bottom lip between her teeth. Ayat mimics the movement.

The punch in her cup is red. The punch to her gut is red. The footprints she leaves as she stumbles to the hallway are red. The vomit that splatters the clean linoleum is red. It is the punch, and the punch is red. _Was_ red, before it was vomit.

Troy is behind her as soon as the black spots clear from her vision; a heavy hand on her back, masterfully dodging vomit. They are attached at the hip; Troy & Ayat. “Are you okay?” he says. “I think that punch was spiked.”

Ayat spits a string of faded pink. “Where’s,” she croaks, and does not bother to finish the question.

“I, uh, don’t actually like her that much,” he says. Ayat is still folded over, one arm thrown over her stomach, the other braced against her knee. He unfolds her. “What are we watching?”

 

 

Pierce calls them  _a peanut-butter-and-chocolate swirl_  while everybody frowns;Annie says, "That sounds yummy!" before she catches Ayat's eye and flushes a pink as feather-light as her fire-escape sunrises.

 

 

Here is what it _is_ : for Troy, things are not _like_ that. Things were fine until Ayat scrambled them by cracking her heart open over medium heat and hoping they would turn out sunny-side-up.

 

 

 _I was addicted to uppers and had a nervous collapse and dropped out of high school when my four-point-oh dropped to a three-point-seven, well, three-point-seven-_ eight _, but that doesn’t matter at all. I mean, I would have rounded it up to a three-point-eight, but - well, they gave Troy this award that I. Well. I wanted it! I wanted it_ so _bad, you don’t even know._

She thinks that people might talk to her because they conflate _lack of eye contact_ with _not really listening_ ; they pour words into her and she swells, full of stories that are not her own, and wrings herself out. She lets them believe it; it is easier for people to speak to a wall with a heartbeat than to somebody who might give _advice_.

 _Therapy_ is a dirty word. She censors it (th*rapy) and files it away for later frustration.

So.

She cocks her head.

 _It was Most Likely to Succeed. And it sounds stupid now, because I know that “success” is subjective, but I was killing myself in the library_ every night _to be the_ best _, and they give it to some guy who averages a C just because he has friends? and charm? and biceps?_

She hears: I _Requiem for a Dream’_ ed, then _Carrie_ ’d, then _Into the Wild_ _'_ ed. A story of cracking skulls and sifting brains through a strainer to fish out the good bits in three parts.

_Then I ran through a plate-glass window and was like, Who’s the athlete now? I didn’t say that but I should have._

She asks, “Did it hurt?” Annie doesn’t remember. _The stitches did,_ she says.

 

 

Ayat remembers when she stopped being a girl and started being a tangle of limbs too long for her body, skinny ribs and tear-drop breasts and her bones held together with loose pieces of string. When the smell of fried chickpeas stuck to her clothes and she folded herself to match plastic chairs, not realizing that she was trying to remain hidden until people began to notice her. Ticket stubs flow from the pockets of mom’s green work jacket. She finds it folded in dad’s closet and he never asks her to return it, so. She nests in it: the wrappers of straws and strands of other people’s hair left on her couch and funny rocks find their way to her pockets, weigh her down. Tether her.

Adolescence (n.) the period of life when a child develops into an adult (Merriam-Webster, 2010). More accurately: when she is plagued by the notion that she is somebody who is always meant to be alone; it is flung into her brain and sticks when she realizes for the first time that she has never seen herself on television. Always staring at herself from the outside, watching herself watching other people and wishing she could understand _why not me_?

It is a skill to imagine a thousand different lives: one where her brain is not hers; one where mom stayed and dad left; one where she is sympathetic and relatable; one where she is a man, or white, or both. Would she be happier? No. Would she? No.

She did not know why she was so _wrong_ , the first time, the first girl, but she learned, and has since been determined to suppress it into normalcy, or else stamp it into nonexistence.

Troy moves in with Pierce; he wants to live with Ayat, she knows that. When her bedroom door closes, the cord is cut. They stop being Troy & Ayat and she is just Ayat alone; it is the only time. She knows Troy, and she loves Troy ( _love_ is hard to define; she and Troy fit together; pieces from two separate puzzles that make an abstract picture. Mountain ridges and round bird pieces melded. God is real; some souls are like that). She cannot live with Troy; she can hardly live with herself.

 

 

Britta, Shirley, and Annie enroll in a class called _Feminist Representations in Media_ ; “That sounds interesting,” says Ayat from beneath the basketball hoop. Her back is braced against the pole: stiff. ridged. parallel. She catches the toss that Jeff misses, throws the ball at his chest. “I’ll come.”

“Oh, we thought this class could be for the _girls_ ,” says Shirley. Honey drips from her lips, sweeter in its authenticity.

Ayat studies her; her neck burns like she has missed out on a joke, or else been the butt of it. The ball thuds into her stomach, rolls away; Jeff and Troy tussle for it.

“I am a girl,” she says.

Britta smacks her palm against her temple, comically overexaggerated. She does not miss out on that. Shirley looks upset. With herself?

Shirley says, “Oh, yes, I know,” in a tone that says _I don’t know, I forget you are a girl because I forget you are a person_. That is a luxury.

“We were _just_ about to invite you to come with us,” Annie lies, linking her arm through Ayat’s.

Britta reassures, “It’s not your fault.” She is always insecure. angry. performing; her arms swing at her sides much further than they need to. “Our Puritan society can’t acknowledge the value of women” (she pronounces it _womb-in_ , deliberate and genuine) “who refuse to conform to outdated standards of femininity.”

“Watch that tone or I’ll make your ass standard,” says Shirley.

 

 

It turns out to have been a stroke of luck, the universe flinging it her way in the manner of  _I gave you a gift, don’t ever ask me for shit again_ , that her bottom bunk remains empty; Annie is late, which is so un-Annie that it prompts immediate concern. Pierce says, _she probably missed the bus._

He follows it up, “She lives above _Dildopolis_ ,” with relish. The chill that runs through her chest at the thought of Annie with pepper-spray in her right hand; entering her apartment with her back against the wall; large, hulking men with glowing eyes lurking in the corners, feels so purely _prey_ that it makes her sick to try to name it.

Annie will not move in if Ayat asks: she has pride too big for her body. Wears it like a high-waisted skirt. Instead, Ayat says, tactful, “It would be nice to have a roommate. For movie nights and alleviating general loneliness,” when they are lying on the floor of her room; one earbud in Ayat’s left ear, the other in Annie’s right; Ayat’s iPod wailing _Just like me you’ve never really had a home of your own / But I’m not Tony Hancock baby_. Subliminal, she hopes.

Annie moves in. Ayat’s sock drawer was fabric-coded; now it is color-coded. She swallows panic and it tastes like blood.

 

 

Troy asks, “How do you want to die?” His pitch spikes, a roller-coaster dip in reverse; his heartbeat thrums against the nape of her neck, where his wrist has paused halfway through a braid. Ayat thinks he is where that idiom originated. _Heart-on-sleeve_.  
  
She says, “I don’t want to.”

 

 

Britta gets a much younger boyfriend who looks like the men on _Hanes_ underwear packages: tall, blonde, generic. He smells like Hollister. Suffocating; she suspects he has just discovered Axe and cocoons himself in it. They neck in the study room, him in Britta’s chair, her on his lap. Everybody picks a water stain on the table to stare at until Jeff arrives and says, wearily, _Britta, come on._

The relationship lasts a week. Britta arrives, hysterical, Thursday afternoon. “He said I’m the ‘perfect Aryan specimen,’” she says, and actually does the air quotes; her voice wavers with an emotion Ayat cannot recognize. “Troy, he called you _dirty_.”  
  
Ayat looks at Troy. Troy says, “He’s _so_ good at Modern Warfare.”  
  
Shirley says, _“_ _Troy_ _!”_  
  
Pierce says, “What kind of sex move is that?”

 

 

Breakfast with Jeff sneaks its way into her routine. They test locations: IHOP; Cracker Barrel; Over-Easy; Snooze, the time Britta joins: she claims she is trying to upgrade to _full veganism_ , but pours a decent amount of whole milk in her coffee. Jeff says, “It’s really not healthy for you to spend twenty-four-seven at Greendale. That place does things to your brain.” He twists his hand by his head, fingers pinched together.

Jeff likes poached eggs; he thinks they are _distinguished_. Runny yolks like brains in a strainer. Jeff orders _scones_ everywhere they go and they suck the moisture from Ayat’s mouth.

The first time, Jeff says, “Black coffee,” pointing to himself, “orange juice,” pointing to Ayat. She says, “Latte.”

Jeff is embarrassed. Jeff says, “I thought.”

Ayat thinks, _I know,_ but she stretches her lips in a plastic smile and says, “Can you believe _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ isn’t even about breakfast?” because she knows he will never see it.

Jeff asks what it _is_ about, then, and Ayat says, “I think. Well, I don’t know if you’ve read Pothier’s 1961 review,” (he hasn’t) “which is shallow and frankly a little incoherent, but he plays up the _aspiration_ of it; _we_ know that _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ is a good movie” (he does not) “but I think it’s admirable that he could recognize the quality of a film that deviated from the growth of franchise entertainment and the onset of action popularity; which, don’t get me wrong, has its merits, but there are good movies and bad movies. _Ocean’s 11_ , the original, I mean, was a good movie; _Night Train to Mundo Fine_ was a bad movie. It’s objectively true, and there is really no excuse.”

Jeff says, “That’s great and all, but what is _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ about?” at the same time that a man saunters to their table and says, “Can I get your number?” He is attractive in a way that feels dishonest. One of his hands is planted on the table, his hip is cocked. He smiles at Ayat, teeth bared.

“Oh,” she says, off-guard. “No, thank you.”

Somebody laughs; a firework-burst of noise; the man looks over his shoulder at a group watching them. Glowing eyes. He looks at Ayat. His face has changed, contorted into something like a warning.

“I was asking you out as a joke. To be funny.”

“Okay,” she says. Jeff stands up; his chair shrieks on the tile. Her hands fly to her ears.

He says, “Buddy, that’s enough. Go back to the hole you crawled out of.”

The words sound underwater, behind her hands. The man says, “Because you’re fucking ugly.” The laughing gets louder, raucous. It sounds like the fourth of July. She squeezes her eyes shut. Jeff says, “I said that’s _enough_ ,” and she opens her eyes and Jeff is in the man’s face, vibrant and escalated, and Ayat presses her hands to her ears hard enough that both hurt; there is a steady, ringing groan escaping her lips, her shoulders are tight, the man says, “Tell your girlfriend to shut up,” and Jeff shoves him.

Jeff and Ayat are banned from IHOP. Shirley sends a text: a picture of their mugshots hanging on the wall.

 

 

She is not angry with Troy, but Troy is angry with her and she is not sure that anger can flow one way, or that she wants it to.

They have already built a blanket fort. She really does not care about breaking records. She does not have a name for this.

 

 

Annie only enters Pillowtown because Ayat stole her memory foam pillow to support the southern flank. _I am not taking sides._ She bites her lip. _But I do live with you, and Troy is my ex-crush, so I_ am _on your side, but that has to be a secret because I’m supposed to be a_ neutral _caretaker._

Ayat smiles without forcing herself to.

 

 

Her phone pings cheerfully. She throws it across the fort. thinks. scrambles after it. Blue light illuminates the edges of the pillows around her; frayed tassels and ugly garden patterns.  
  
T-BONE (8:49 PM)  
Hey. Bitch.  
  
She wants to reply. Her stomach twists the way her mouth does when Jeff makes a joke that she knows is a joke because of his inflection but can’t figure out otherwise. Bitch? Her neck burns, shameful.

Bubbled ellipses. She watches them intently.  
  
T-BONE (8:49 PM)  
Read your dumb email. Really enjoyed it. (Thats sarcasm.)  
  
Troy is considerate. He knows that she can’t quite catch sarcasm with the ease that he throws it. He is _so_ considerate. _Bitch_. That e-mail was tactical.  
  
Ayat, strategic. Troy, kind. _Bitch_. It gives Ayat the edge, but that doesn’t matter much now. She hugs her phone to her chest.  
  
Yin. Yang. Cloudy skies; dry air. Et cetera.  
  
T-BONE (8:51 PM)  
Guess what? You may have been my best friend but we both know I was your FIRST friend.  
  
That’s a comic-book punch. Bam. Pow. They watched _Scott Pilgrim vs The World_ together, before all of this. She wishes she could capture his _all-dogs-are-boys-all-cats-are-girls_ innocence in a photo. Red blooms in her stomach and fights its way up her throat. It’s too familiar.  
  
T-BONE (8:53 PM)  
And what I know but you don’t know (because you have mental issues) is that you’re never going to have another friend because NOBODY ELSE WILL EVER HAVE MY PATIENCE WITH YOU.

It is so quiet; drawing breath rattles her bones, like a cheap Halloween decoration strung up on a tree. She does not have a name for this, but it seems eerily close to _th*rapy_.

 

 

Ayat says, “It’s his fault.” It is. Anger cannot flow one way, or it piles inside of her with nowhere to go. They have already built a blanket fort. She really, _really_ does not care about breaking records. Troy does, all of a sudden, and it’s as unfamiliar as _Bitch_ , and she can’t understand why.  
  
Troy says, “Look at your dumb e-mail.”  
  
“You weren’t supposed to see that.”  
  
“You weren’t supposed to _think_ those things.”  
  
He is not going to cry. That’s a milestone.  
  
The e-mail was not hurtful, whatever _that_ means. It was accurate. _Troy is insecure about his intelligence_. She does not know why, but he is. Troy is the smartest person she has ever met, except for herself, and Annie, and that receptionist who gave her a Rubik’s cube in the lobby; she was five and waiting.  
  
Now she is twenty-two and still. Standing motionless in the middle of it all while the world turns around her and people keep living. It is not fair that her life falls apart at the slightest nudge. She is always waiting for somebody else to take the reins; does not trust them outside of her own hands. Mom and dad’s hushed fighting while she fiddles with a Rubik’s cube; peppered blues and she’s-not-normals and a yellow square that she cannot get to fit with the others.  
  
Troy knows butter noodles from ramen.  
  
“You’re so _stubborn_ ,” says Troy. Jeff says _Hey_ ; Troy ignores him, shoves away the arm that is flung in front of his chest. “You would rather do what _you_ want to do alone than do something less fun with me.”  
  
Ayat is confused. That is normal.  
  
“No, it’s not,” says Troy. His brows are pinched together; there is a little fold between them. “You put your happiness above everybody else’s.”  
  
She says, “That’s normal.” The needle of a broken record scratches at her lips. Jeff looks at her; he is squinting, like he can’t quite see her. “Breaking records is stupid.”  
  
Troy grapples with the air. He says, “It’s not _about_ the record.”

“Ayat, baby,” says Shirley, gentle, irksome. “What Troy is saying is that he puts _your_ happiness above his own.” Troy nods. “And he wishes you would do the same for him.”  
  
Ayat does not look at Shirley; she looks at Jeff. The realization hurts a little, because Jeff is himself.  
  
“I don't think I can do that,” she says, and leaves. The squeak of Italian soles trail on the linoleum behind her; they are halfway to the study room, aptly named _Ground Zero_ , when Jeff throws an arm around her and digs the knuckles of his closed fist into the top of her head.

 

 

She will stand here until the feathers start to scar and her arms fall off if it means she and Troy can be together, even if they are fighting.

Troy says, “We can’t stop.”

 

 

They are mountain ridges and round bird pieces; their hands never slap against each other, against their chests, _thud-thud_ , again. She is afraid to ask. She is afraid her hat will fall off.

 

 

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s is about the search for simple rituals in an environment that thrives on chaos.”

Jeff says, _Does Audrey Hepburn play Tiffany_?

 

 

Dad won’t pay for an apartment until Ayat gets a job, which turns out to be a skillful zugzwang because Ayat cannot keep a job for longer than a month; the _fried chicken incident_ , a stain that they all are keen to forget, is the closest she has ever come. So Troy says _let’s get an apar_ and Ayat interrupts, “Annie and I are thinking of replacing the couch in our dorm with a fold-out, you should live with us.” She wants to be in control of the situation, even if he has pushed her to it.

It is  
  
She wants this to be the final scene of the movie, the happy ending, the _friends-sitting-in-a-diner-sharing-milkshakes-and-laughing_ ; she wants to say _it is home_ or _it is perfect_ but it is

Crowded.

They pretend it’s not. He sets a cup of noodles in front of her, two chopsticks sitting in it like antennae. The dried carrots and corn have been scraped off of the top because he assumes that she doesn’t like them and she never corrects him (but he is wrong, she was raised on _food textures that scandalize Americans_ : raw minced meat and sour yogurt, the things that swim in her stomach like a PBS special about digestion; organs with goggling eyes). The noodles bathe in an excess of soy sauce. Troy says, “Sorry.”

She does not say anything. Sometimes words swell in her mouth like packing peanuts. She looks at the yellow ring of spice stuck to the inside of the styrofoam cup.

She says, “Where were you all day?” once the packing peanuts have dissolved.  
  
“I was on a date. With Britta. I mean, I _think_ it was a date? It was just the two of us, and the restaurant didn’t have coloring pages, so I _guess_ it was a date.”

He joins her on the bottom bunk, where they are not supposed to be sitting, much less eating; it is _Annie’s Space_ (It’s important for each member of the household to have their own private space which cannot be tread upon by any other member of the household; yes, Ayat, I know this isn’t a _house_ , but the rule still stands).

A domino in the air obeys Newton and sinks back into her.

It is jarring, how quickly things make sense.

 

 

Impulse seizes her and steers. She imagines slicing Jeff’s arm off, quick and dirty; blood pools in her mouth from her own swelling lips. She imagines the taste of Jeff’s blood on her tongue to be richer than her own; the grind of bone against metal rings and snaps, outdated telephone cord and landline.  
  
She buys a bone-saw on Amazon. Files it away.

 

 

American Eagle calls her jeans Tomgirl, which she understands to mean a girl who does not want her form hugged or outlined; a girl who wants to be invisible, swallowed in her clothes (which, ironically, makes her _more_ visible than Anniegirls, who straighten their hair and pluck their brows and hike their skirts up when Jeff walks in the room).  
  
Annie wears red-rimmed glasses in the morning; Annie’s hair is curly in the morning. Ayat says, “I like it.”  
  
Annie says, “You’re lying,” and spends forty-five minutes pinning it up, painstakingly ironing each section until it is dried of character and sits smooth and shiny. Annie offers to straighten Ayat’s hair, which has never behaved; a person she does not recognize stares at her; she stares back.

“Why did you make Troy and Britta go on a date?” escapes before she can stop it. She watches the Annie in the mirror, the not-Annie, and waits.

Annie laughs a little. She says, “I didn’t _make_ them do anything; I thought they would be cute together, and they’re both single, and.”

“And you want to be with Jeff,” finishes Ayat. No judgment. No inflection. No out-of-the-ordinary. Yes lurch of her stomach, and the slippery feeling of lonely-lonely-lonely high school Ayat stuck to her hands.  
  
Annie says, “No.”  
  
Annie says no. Her eyes are wide. Ayat wishes she could read them. It is easy to read a screenplay. Sometimes. The words dance around the page, step on each other’s toes. _Patient_ turns to _parent_ , and the two are antonyms. Annie’s hand circles Ayat’s wrist (her hands are so neat, devoid of the chewed nails and torn cuticles on Ayat’s own fingers) and she crosses around to face Ayat in the chair and she swoops down in a smooth motion and their lips collide, more teeth than anything. It is not the way she was taught to kiss boys in high school, cornered in the girl’s bathroom when she slimmed down, shot up. _Monkey Love_ (2005): she was the wire mother; practical, unmoving. Now, she is all cloth. Kissing Annie plateaus her brain into a steady rhythm of coolcoolcoolcoolcool and she touches Annie’s hair, smooth and shiny and sticking to the sweat on her palms.

 

 

  
They would never be in a movie, the way he kisses her. Black boy; brown girl. By surprise. They might be in a porn somewhere, not that she cares to look.  
  
Troy says, “I love you.”

Ayat says, _I know_. She is not Han Solo. She is a brown girl in a community college in Colorado, and he is a fraction past adolescence too late, and something is crunching on the floor beneath her socks because Annie does not take her shoes off indoors. Ayat’s head feels like television static; it feels like closing the door. _Of course_.  
  
There is no grand swell of music; there is no plane to run to.  
  
Troy asks a question without making a sound. Ayat does not respond; Troy accepts this as an answer of its own, which she thinks is wholly unfair but a little well-deserved.

 

 

Pretend it didn’t happen pretend it didn’t happen pretend 

 

 

It didn’t happen.

 

 

Troy leaves and the lava stays. It pools at her feet. It eats holes in the carpet and swallows her whole.

 

 

She has love. She has stability. She has a DVD player, and a fire escape. A constant mantra drones, punctuation to her thoughts; airplanes tracing nonsensical loops in the sky. This does not ease the ache of a scrolling message at the bottom of the television screen: _Levar Burton and non-celebrity companion captured by pirates in the Gulf of Mexico._

Love, stability, fuck _off_. She is sick to death of sunrises.

Instead, she entertains the storyboard to a heist-rescue movie; _Rambo_ , she explains. _But we steal their treasure, too._  
  
Jeff thinks _Rambo_ is overhyped.  
  
“I know this is hard,” he says. “But. Ayat. You’ve gone from lovable-weird to _dangerous_ -weird.”  
  
Ayat looks at him and thinks _bone-saw_. She looks to her left, where Britta would be sitting if she weren’t attending to her diabetic cat (or maybe the cat is blind, or deaf, or just dead or something), and to her right where Troy would be sitting if he weren’t _captured by pirates in the Gulf of Mexico, breaking news._ Pierce’s seat is empty; some part of her will always call it _Pierce’s seat_. Shirley is at home with her cookie-cutter family. She used to make gingerbread around the holidays (“Around _Christmas_ ,” Shirley corrects, hovering above Ayat in a thought-bubble). Annie is there and she is wide-eyed and nervous; her foot taps a quick, dulled rhythm on the floor.

“Is it just me, or has our cast been significantly reduced?” says Ayat.  
  
Jeff slams his palm flat on the table. Annie jumps. Ayat blinks slow. The way people do when they want a cat to trust them, unless that cat is blind.  
  
“This,” says Jeff, slow, “is real life.” He stands; his hand hovers over the table. It can’t bring itself to deliver a second blow. He leaves the room. He leaves the room.  
  
Jeff leaves the room.  
  
Annie stretches her arm across the table and Jeff leaves the room and she takes Ayat’s hand and Jeff leaves the room and neither of them speak so the space where Jeff was grows and it becomes the space that Jeff Britta Pierce Shirley Troy was and Ayat looks around and she may be dying. Jeff leaves the room and Ayat looks around and she may be dying because things have never felt this apart before. The seams of her organs unravel and her hand slips from Annie’s and her body slips from the chair and she presses her cheek to the lava and it hisses when her eye leaks onto it.  
  
“Fade out,” she says. She can hear the muffled sound of Annie’s chair scraping against the carpet. “End scene.”

 

 

  
Annie wants to pet her hair and put a bandaid on it all; Ayat wants to go to a fancy restaurant and pretend to be normal, so she does. Dimly, she realizes that sitting in an upscale bistro alone in Annie’s threadbare yellow cardigan, accessorized by loose strands of Annie’s curly hair (it smells comforting; it smells like holding Annie’s hand) and worn jeans is far from normal, but she does it anyway. If she pretends for long enough that she is dressed to the nines, _Pretty Woman_ ’ed up, she can get herself to believe it.  
  
She orders a mint julep and nurses it.  
  
Most of the time, she feels too old to still be entangled in a cycle of crises. It is a game of jump-rope that she leapt into and cannot escape. There was a sense of finality to Troy’s departure; now, she is left in suspense, fingertips searching for purchase on the edge of a cliff. If the Gulf of Mexico were thrashing below her it might all work out. _I’m sorry we couldn’t love each other that way_ , she would say. _But that is no reason to get kidnapped by pirates_.  
  
She realizes, very suddenly, that she is _missing_ ; it should have been obvious, but this is the first time her feelings are clearly projected before her, not a jawbreaker she must hold inside and be patient for. She misses the constancy of having a best friend; more than that, she misses _him_. Troy left and took the fun symptoms of Ayat with him, so she was left with number one. the panic. number two. pathetic attempts to resurrect something which died a long time ago. number two-and-a-half. equally pathetic attempts to keep something dying alive. number three. regression into list-making.  
  
Twenty-five is gaining on her. She is supposed to have everything figured out by now.  
  
Britta told her, years ago, that she was an _actual_ adult (not a kid masquerading as an adult, like you) and _still_ did not have everything figured out. Ayat had said, “That doesn’t inspire confidence.”

Jeff finds her too soon; the guilt onsets earlier each time. Wile E. Coyote, the Road Runner: they will never grow tired of running circles around each other.  
  
He slides in beside her and sighs, heavy and deflated. Like a spitting balloon. The chatter in the bistro floats above them; she and Jeff are encased in a silent bubble, out-of-place zoo animals. This is how she will always feel. It is nice to give it a name.  
  
“You don’t have to do this,” says Jeff. He looks as uncomfortable as she feels, slumped in the booth and twisting the cloth napkin in his hands. Ayat stares. She raises her eyebrows.  
  
“You don’t have to. You don’t have to be normal,” he clarifies. “I’m sorry. That I expected you to be.” A pause. An aged scotch. No ice; she remembers that. He won’t order it for himself. “ _Again_. I really need to stop doing that, huh?” He scratches the back of his neck; the shallow _scritch-scritch_ of nails on short spikes of hair bursts their bubble. “I love you _because_ you’re not normal. And, come on. None of us are.”  
  
“Can we go to Snarfburger?” There is a sizable lump lodged in her throat that she cannot seem to swallow around. She sucks at her straw until her empty cup growls beneath leftover ice and Jeff smiles, very pained; she is embarrassing him.  
  
“It’s thirty minutes away,” is his response. The growling continues and she looks at him, mouth wrapped around the straw and the unanswered question. He texts Annie (something like _I found her_ or _Meet us at Snarfburger_ or _She loves you, and me, study group or not_ , although she does not know how he could know that, but maybe he is more perceptive than she gives him credit for) and says, “I’ll drive.”

**Author's Note:**

> small brain: rule 63ing a character and making a ship straight in the process is bad and i shouldn’t do it
> 
> big brain: abed nadir should have been a girl and i’m just correcting the mistakes of a culture that doesn’t want women to be disordered in an unappealing way
> 
> galaxy brain: i want to write abed/annie without perpetuating the injustice of putting annie in a relationship with a man


End file.
